Please pray...

...for my brother-in-law. He is really struggling with depression and is beginning to despair about finding a job close to family. He's also thinking that he will have to sell the house they just bought last summer. He's been working so hard to renovate it and make it a home for his little girl, and now it looks like he will have to let it go unless a good job comes to him soon. Very soon.

His wife is reported to be dating somebody else. She started a job yesterday, so she's employed and he's not, which means he hopes to hold off on any legal steps regarding divorce and custody right now.

He's right -- if he's unemployed, she'd probably get custody, even though she doesn't have a permanent address, she abandoned both her husband and her child, and her behavior has been terribly erratic for the last five months. The courts here tend to favor mothers 15 to 1 in custody arrangments. We know of precious few fathers who have fought for primary custody and won, and in every case, there was an issue of the wife's arrest record or institutionalization in a mental health facility that went to the man's favor. Of course, we also know of some cases in which the wives gladly handed over the children to the father. But there's honestly no telling what Heidi would do if it came down to legalities. She's so very much not at all like she was even last spring, none of us can predict what she would want in terms of custody.

So, my brother-in-law needs a job, and he needs one soon. And it needs to be local, because if he has to move out of state, he's sure he won't get primary custody of his daughter. We're doing what we can to encourage him, but the poor guy is faced with such a huge multi-faceted crisis, our words bear little comfort.

--Sparki